The scanning of paper documentation into digital images is well known. Some of the advantages of digital or electronic documents over paper documents include reduced storage space, immediate and simple copying, quick retrieval, easy sharing through electronic transfer (e.g., e-mail), persistent and non-volatile nature of a digital format, and the conservation of natural resources such as trees. While a completely digital office is not a reality for most businesses, it is rare to find a business that doesn't rely heavily on digital documents in the ordinary course of its business.
For example, property owners, land developers, architects, and document management professionals scan active and historical documents relating to properties, such as building blueprints, floor plans, and riser diagrams, to save space and enable more efficient copying and distribution of the documents. However, once a drawing is scanned, the scale information on the drawing is not computer recognizable when the digital version of the paper drawing is viewed on a monitor or display device. In particular, the digital image of the drawing is typically captured as a digital image having a certain pixel by pixel dimension with no direct or easy means to establish a relationship to the scale information contained on the original drawing. Thus, when the image is viewed using a monitor or display, it is virtually impossible for the user to obtain true measurement information from the rendered image because the scale of the paper drawing, for instance, one inch equals three feet, is not valid for the rendered image on the monitor or display.
Traditionally when paper plans are scanned and digitized for electronic storage, the images original physical size, and therefore the corresponding usefulness of the image scale, of a particular document is no longer a concrete attribute of the image. For example, if a paper version of an infrastructure plan is thirty inches in height and forty inches in width and then scanned, a computer user of that scanned electronic image would see the document as a different physical size when using different monitors depending on the size of the display device and its own pixel resolution. Thus, the scale that appears on the document (e.g., one eighth inch equals one foot, etc.) will be incorrect when an electronic depiction of the document is displayed on a computer monitor. This is because the original physical size of a paper image has no direct correlation to the pixel dimensions of a computer monitor. As a result, a 20 inch wide monitor can only display an image as twenty inches wide if viewing the whole image and a twenty-five inch wide monitor can only display an image as twenty-five inches wide if viewing the whole image. Also, neither monitor would be able to display the whole image as it originally appeared, that is, as a forty inch wide image. The user has no way to know what the original physical size of the paper drawing was, yet the scale ratio of the image listed on the plan is directly tied to the physical size of the original paper document. So if a computer user viewing the scanned infrastructure plan on a twenty-five inch monitor tried to take a physical measurement of the image on the computer monitor using that data with the image scale to manually compute a true scale measurement the result would be a wrong measurement value. Furthermore zooming the image so that only portions of the original image appear on the computer monitor also distorts the physical size of the image making any physical measurement of an image or image element not useful when combined with scale to calculate a true scale dimension measurement. In essence, once a paper drawing is scanned, the scale information on that drawing is no longer valid and accurate when a digital version of the paper drawing is viewed on a monitor or display device.
Accordingly, some of the utility inherent in paper documents is lost when the documents are digitized. This lost utility is particularly problematic when it is desirable to determine the measurements of a room, the length of a wall, or the square footage of a section of a floor, which is often the main reason for viewing the drawings. In addition, when annotating the digital drawing, it is often desirable to annotate where the graphic annotations retain a true scale ratio to the rendered subject matter represented on the digital image.
Thus, there exists an unsatisfied need in the industry for a means to view, and distribute a digital drawing with the ability to determine true and precise dimension information which accurately describes the rendered subject matter.
Also, it is known that event information regarding buildings can be displayed with the digital drawing of buildings. For instance, it is known that buildings can be provided with various alarm systems. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/434,390 discloses a method of displaying event information from a building system where the event is a non-normal condition generated within a building system. Information regarding the building is displayed on a display portion. The displayed information is selectable and changeable by a user. An alarm graphic can also be displayed which relates to a non-normal condition in a building. A user may elect to show a floor plan, which discloses the status of fire system alarm generating devices. However, while this graphic may be displayed, the user is unaware of the accurate to-scale spatial relationships that exist between people in the building, the non-normal condition, and the building's structural characteristics.
A responder assets management system (RAMS) is disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/038,572. The disclosed system utilizes information available to responders including emergency response personnel including local weather, national weather, and links to other information. The system also provides virtual walkthrough capability of a building or facility. However, while providing this virtual walkthrough, there is no ability for the user to scale and zoom to determine exact spatial relationships.
Finally, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/177,577 discloses a system and method for detecting monitoring and evaluating hazardous situations in a structure. Sensors having two-way communication capability are strategically located in a structure or in a matrix of structures. These units are high-level multi-functional detectors that communicate with a base computer. However, as with the other systems discussed above, there is no spatial relationship provided for users so that they can determine their exact relationship to the hazardous situations within a structure.
Spatial relationship is further indeterminable in the prior art due to the type of displays, viewers, or graphic view ports, used to view the graphically represented floor plans or drawings. Two traditional types of displays used in the prior art are either 2D displays or 3D displays. Though each display provides users individual benefits, these benefits are limited. For instance, a 2D display can be used by a user to plot a space with respect to the entire building or structure, however the 2D display cannot describe the complete geometry nor visual qualities of the interior of a room or passageway of a structure. In such cases, when a user is using the 2D display of a floor to plot entry or exit routes in a structure, details regarding the architecture and geometry of a particular route cannot be comprehensively determined as they could be in a true scale 3D animation or true scale 3D virtual representation of the space. Also, use of only 2D displays does not permit route adjustments to be made for architectural and hazardous elements visually identified in the building that arise along a navigated path. For example a 2D floor plan may indicate that a particular passage way is wide enough for a particular piece of equipment, however the actual height and architectural geometry of the passage way in all dimensions cannot be represented in the two dimensional representation. As a result emergency teams or other building system workers are being presented with incomplete data that can directly cause bad or hazardous decisions when using only the 2D floor plan as decision support tool.
The benefits of viewing a floor plan when using only a 3D display also is compromised as the user merely views the interior of a structure without being able to quickly identify the wall construction and embedded electrical, natural gas, and plumbing details. Additionally, users using 3D displays can only observe the spatial relationship for objects in a room that are directly in their cone of vision and are unaware of potentially hazardous/important adjoining room/area characteristics, including, but not limited to blocked passages, location of hazardous materials, alarm status and other critical items of importance.
The prior art provides for visualization of graphics either in 2D or in 3D in isolation, however a display is needed that provides improved viewing capabilities to take advantage of a novel visual data relationship created by the invention. Such a display would provide the cumulative advantage of both the 3D and 2D displays. Thus a display is needed that would create a synchronized true scale visual relationship between two related and connected but independent data perspectives in a way unseen in previous technologies. A display is needed that can form a symbiotic data visualization between true scale 3D and 2D displays, which is not realized when such displays are viewed independently, even when viewed in succession. Such a display would permit simultaneous display of a route in 3D and 2D with concurrent access to critical, measurable, spatial and relationship data via a true scale coordinate-linked display. It is also desired that such a display would produce an accurate, true scale measurement of the route.